Please help me move my files from overloaded laptop to external drives

November 1, 2005 10:41 AM

I've overfilled my laptop and want to move files to external drives. But moving keeps getting stopped for various reasons (and what the hell is a cyclic redundancy??) and I'm going nuts. Please send me your speed tips and procedure suggestions! The specifics: Toshiba satellite running windows xp; total c drive size 55.8gb, free space 12.6. External drives: f (in fat 32 which I'd like to reformat to ntfs) has a capacity of 152gb, and has only 66.1 free. Newest drive g (i've just formatted it to ntfs) has a capacity of 111gb, with 103 left after my abortive attempts to put an image disc of c on it. Thanks ...

I'd LOVE to move all from c to f or g, then wipe c and reinstall only what I use regularly, keeping movable media on f or g to use while working on c or listening on e (1 gb flash mp3). But c is heavily fragged, f is pretty full but not formatted to ntfs (but you know ... it accesses much faster than my ntfs drives ...). Defragging is taking days, image mapping is too and keeps stopping; direct moving runs me into the cannot move due to cyclic redundancy nightmare; I have no screen saver running but wonder if it all stops when the screen blanks ... and I can get no speed to DO MY WORK while it's defragging or (trying to) image map.

Thus, I've had g for 2 weeks now and still have not emptied my c drive onto it.

Sorry. I sound pretty whiny here. But I'm just so frustrated.

posted by thewhynotgirl to computers & internet (14 comments total)

how are these disks connected to the computer?

"cyclic redundancy" refers to an error checking code. if you're seeing that something could be pretty seriously borked - perhaps the connection, or perhaps your disk is dying.

first thing i would do is copy everything important to another drive, no matter how long it takes.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:53 AM on November 1, 2005

I had a similar problem. I recommend getting something like Norton Ghost and cloning the defective drive to the external.

You may also be able to repair the cyclic redundancy error with a tool like R-Studio.
posted by justkevin at 10:57 AM on November 1, 2005

I am trying to copy to another drive, Andrew, but I get "cyclical redundancy error: cannot copy file (name)". And then the whole copy process stops and I have to go back and check to see which copied and which didn't, one by one and start over. Sometimes that same file will move/copy later, sometimes not; so it's a crapshoot and a very tedious one.

I have also tried to clone the drive, justkevin (what i was calling image mapping) and I get "sector x is unreadable", and in the manual it says do not proceed without defragmenting if sectors are unreadable.

So then I go to defragment and in 24 hours only 18% has been (completed? reclaimed? I dunno) on the c drive.

Meantime, I am unable to work with the computer because it crawls like a snail. Maybe I'm not supposed to use it while defragging, but I have things to do!

So this is where I am now.

I promise never ever again to overload it like that.

Really.

Sigh.
posted by thewhynotgirl at 11:57 AM on November 1, 2005

What software are you using to do the clone with?

I was able to repair a file that gave me a "cyclic redundancy" error with R-Studio.

While the drive probably need to be defragged, I don't think it will solve your problem. The bad files need to be repaired first.
posted by justkevin at 12:10 PM on November 1, 2005

If you've got an IBM DeskStar drive in your LT it's probably dieing giving you the CRC errors. If you can dig up a copy of ghost it has a command line switch to ignore errors when imaging. Files with errors will still be unreadable but the files that tend to go bad first are swap so often your data is ok.
posted by Mitheral at 12:57 PM on November 1, 2005

Okay, thewhynotgirl, I don't want to scare you, but as of right this minute you need to stop defragging the hard disk, stop doing you work, and think very clearly about the following question:

What's the most important data on the C: drive that I *HAVE* to *KEEP*?

I hate to break it to you, but it's pretty clear to me that you have a severe hard disk crash approaching on this laptop.

You will have to replace the internal hard disk drive.

The reason the defragment is taking days is because your hard disk has bad clusters- parts of the disk that are exposed to the operating system that are no longer capable of reliably storing information. When you have bad clusters exposed, the OS will attempt to re-access that cluster over and over and over. The timeout period is pretty long too- the system doesn't want to give up.

All hard disks have bad clusters. To get around this, hard disk manufacturers make the disks larger than what they market them as. Then, they use the spare space left over for internally remapping the bad clusters to good clusters. Usually, your data is moved from bad to good spaces automatically, until the disk runs out of room or has a problem.

That's what the Cyclic Redundancy error is about, as well. Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC's) is a way to detect and discover errors in written information. Data stored on your HDD is tied in with a CRC checksum, and then checked for errors when accessed. So, you're getting the CRC error because your disk is spitting out the wrong data when ever Windows asks for information, whether to copy it or move it.

Bad clusters can spread. In fact, they usually do after a threshold, because they're caused by something else- dust, dirt, component failure, alignment, actuator problems, you name it.

So, starting to see the urgency here?

Get your data saved pronto, and focus on getting your computer fixed. You can do all this yourself- just do your best to copy ONLY the most important stuff- stuff you need. Then, go down next to getting personal stuff. Don't try to defrag, don't try to capture an image of the disk- these will cause too much activity on the drive and will accelerate the disk failure.

After your important stuff is saved, then you will have to get a new hard disk (buy one online or call your manufacturer if your laptop is still under warranty), and reinstall Windows.

This is probably not what you wanted to hear, but based on your post, I'm afraid this is really what's going on, and you're going to be in deep trouble if you don't address it immediately.

Good luck!
posted by id at 3:52 PM on November 1, 2005

Listen very carefully to what id has to say above: your disc has run out of remapping space and the more you use it, the more data you'll lose. Get the important stuff off first - that means your documents, personal data, etc, NOT applications. Apps can be reinstalled from the original media.
posted by polyglot at 4:48 PM on November 1, 2005

SpeedFan will read the disk SMART attributes and hopefully give some idea as to how healthy the drive is. The most important and obvious attributes are temperature (>50c is generally bad, and can make otherwise fine drives misbehave in the way you're describing and suffer early failure) and reallocated sector count, which should have a raw value of 0 in any healthy drive.

Low performance can also result from a disk slipping into PIO mode, which reduces IO to a couple of MB/s and eats vast quantities of CPU time. CRC errors can also result from system crashes, bad memory, and disk controller bugs (which is the primary trigger for switching to PIO mode; it's slow but (usually) reliable).

Whatever the problem, your first priority should be to get any data you care about backed up, and, if the drive is getting toasty, making it less so.
posted by Freaky at 4:56 PM on November 1, 2005

I'm going to mirror id's comments about the possible severity of this issue. But also keep in mind that a cyclic reduncy check error can also occur from a not so dire situation. Perhaps a file that was not written to disk properly the first time. If that is the case, you could've only lost that file. I seem to have ran into a CRC error recently and it was eventually decided that the file was being written during a power failure. Successive complete disk checks did not find any bad clusters.

It should also be noted that a FAT32->NTFS conversion can be done in place by opening a command console(Win+R: cmd or Start->Run->cmd) and type 'convert c: /fs:ntfs'. When you reboot your computer, the conversion will take place before Windows boots.
posted by mnology at 5:30 PM on November 1, 2005

thank you, id, and everyone. So that's what I'll do - move the most important stuff off pronto, the windows explorer way with no added software -- right?

I wanted to wipe and reinstall anyway, so that's cool. But diagnose tools were saying c drive was healthy ... should I buy a new internal drive just in case? Or is that wasteful?

Justkevin, I was using evaluation of this to clone c drive.

And just to say, this cool utility has been a boon in showing me just what is hogging space on my drive. So maybe just deleting a bunch of stuff and freeing space first will make moving the keepers go faster since the drive will be less strained? Looks like a bunch of incomplete downloads there -- could they have caused special problems?

Anyhow, thanks so for the heads up. I'll get moving and deleting.
posted by thewhynotgirl at 6:52 PM on November 1, 2005

mnology - I don't understand. My c drive is already ntfs, as is my newly new external g. It's the pretty filled f that's still fat32 and, as I understand that reformatting wipes data, I figured I was in a goose-fox-rowboat situation about reformatting it.

So are you saying that my external drive can be converted to ntfs without losing the 80gb of data already stored there?
posted by thewhynotgirl at 7:00 PM on November 1, 2005

Windows is shipped with a utility to convert FAT volumes to NTFS. There's plenty of information out there about how to use it.
posted by majick at 7:53 PM on November 1, 2005

"So maybe just deleting a bunch of stuff and freeing space first will make moving the keepers go faster since the drive will be less strained?"

Nope. It will make defrags and full backups go faster just because there's less data there, and the more free space on a drive the less likely it is to become seriously fragmented through further use.

Performance wise, here's a recipe that might result in your drive running faster: Right click My Computer, select Manage. Click Device Manager. Open the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers section. You'll have a couple of Primary/Secondary IDE Controllers listed; right click on (usually) the first one and go into Properties. Under Advanced Settings should be an option for Transfer Mode, as well as information as to what the current one is.

Locate your internal drive, make sure it's set to use DMA mode by default; if it's not, well, that'll be why the drive is so slow and you can't seem to do anything while it's doing much. If it's set to try to use DMA but it's not, you can right click Uninstall on the offending controller; it'll be re-detected when you reboot and should be back at full speed, assuming the controller itself isn't blacklisted.
posted by Freaky at 3:18 AM on November 2, 2005

Just updating that I'm slogging along, moving files and making note of what won't move; have emptied almost half by now; not lost too much either ... and am racing against that temperature monitor at a pretty steady 58-62C, no matter how I try to change it. Thanks for that utility, Freaky, as it has burned continually hot. Last year, the power cord for this computer actually burst into flames after being on for only 15 minutes ,,, apparently not as uncommon as I'd like. Could this be related, or did I err in overloading? Last year it was decidedly not overloaded.

However, that's a whole new post hehe.

In close, if it died right now, I'd be happy that I had 'enough' saved to another drive, thanks to you guys.

That's pretty cool :).
posted by thewhynotgirl at 12:55 PM on November 2, 2005